A former partner at Lehman Brothers spins an audacious financial thriller based on real events — the 2008 financial crisis — that features cameos by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The novel juxtaposes the ideals of loyalty, service, patriotism and noblesse oblige against the venality of contemporary Wall Street.

In 1913, Delvin is born to a “good-time gal” in Chattanooga, Tenn., and is left first to the care of an orphanage and then to a kindly undertaker, from whom he learns the mechanics of death. A harrowing tale of survival in the Jim Crow South.

A woman looks back on her youthful involvement with a Charles Manson-like cult. The most remarkable quality of this novel is Cline’s ability to articulate the anxieties of adolescence in gorgeously poetic language.

A Pennsylvania town is torn apart by the dirty business of fracking. The brilliance of Haigh’s novel is most evident in how effortlessly it portrays the interconnectedness of the many constituencies involved in and affected by extracting fuel by that method.

Starting in the mid-1700s and reaching to the present day, this story moves back and forth between the descendants of two half-sisters born in Ghana: One is sold into slavery and sent to America; the other marries a British governor and stays behind.

At more than 1,200 pages, this phantasmagoric epic covers over 1,000 years in an English town teeming with painters and prostitutes, would-be poets and biblical demons who must reckon with the episodes of time slippage between their world and a shadowy parallel realm.

Four adult siblings arrive for what might be the final summer at their late grandparents’ place in the countryside. For anyone who cherishes the subtle pleasure of Anne Tyler’s and Alice Munro’s novels.

The first of Enrigue’s novels to appear in English imagines a tennis match between the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo and the Italian painter Caravaggio. World history gets bounced around just as much as the ball — made from Anne Boleyn’s hair.

Anglophiles mourning the end of “Downton Abbey” will find solace in this novel that begins in pre-World War I England and deftly observes the effect of war on the staid Edwardian sensibilities of the coastal village of Rye.

The most revolutionary reimagining of Jefferson’s life ever: a colossal postmodern novel that mixes time periods, voices and genres. It’s often baffling, possibly offensive and frequently bizarre, but always arrestingly brilliant.

Searching for anonymous sex in Bulgaria, a young American strikes up a fraught friendship with a rakish drifter. In these poetic sentences, emotional fearlessness is mated with extraordinary sensitivity to the tremors of regret.

A series of loosely connected, magically tinged tales about personal and social justice. Built around the idea of keys, locks and magic doors, the stories cover a wide territory — including mythology and fairy tales, and smartphones and YouTube stars.

A new case dredges up painful memories for Lu Brant, the new state’s attorney of Howard County, Md. In what feels like Lippman’s most personal novel, the book is as much a legal drama as it is a tale of childhood and family life.

In the early 1860s, in a boggy town in central Ireland, an 11-year-old girl refuses all food and stays in her cramped bedroom with her nurse. Skeptics jokingly speculate that she must be living on scent alone. When pressed, the pious girl confesses that she’s surviving on manna from heaven.

By following a handful of young Indian men in England, Sahota has captured the plight of millions of desperate people struggling to find work, to eke out some semblance of a decent life in a world increasingly closed-fisted and mean. This is “The Grapes of Wrath” for the 21st century.

In his most ­funereal novel, DeLillo describes a wealthy man determined to save his dying wife by keeping her frozen in cryonic suspension for millennia. The trademark DeLillo themes are coolly updated for the Internet age.